As usual, I was really looking forward to the upcoming holidays. I love Christmas. Right after Thanksgiving I get into the holiday spirit. I listen to radio stations that play Christmas music only, I decorate our home, I make my Christmas shopping list, my wish list for Santa (this year was the first time in my life I wrote it), I make cookies (this time I made butter cookies in different Christmas shapes with glaze and sprinkles and I took it to some of my former co-workers), and I make our family Christmas card. We also got a tree three days before Christmas, so, just like last year, it can stay mostly green till my Mom’s visit in the middle of January.

After I did my Christmas shopping and the wrapping of all our Christmas presents, I looked at the two huge bags of presents we had to load in our car and thought that we have been really blessed this year to be able to afford all this. It is so exciting to be able to get something that will make a person you love happy! With our car loaded with gifts, food for making and baking, clothes for five days and ourselves, we headed to spend an exciting couple of days at Alexei’s grandparents’.

There were couple of new and not so new things that happened in our little munchkin’s life this holiday season. On Christmas Eve and all the following family dinners, Alexei really liked sitting in his high chair and enjoyed a view of so many people eating, laughing and talking. He kept looking at everybody and once he caught somebody’s eyes he did a very cute nose thing, his trade mark smile, an Alexei original, which he has been doing since he was much younger.

On Christmas day Alexei was way overwhelmed with presents. After all, he is the baby of the family now. In spite of the amount of gifts, we managed to open all of them.

The next day we had a very nice walk with our Granddaddy. Alexei walked all by himself almost all the time. The same day we tried to put him back into his newly established, first-ever schedule! The main part of it is that Alexei has at least a three hour nap in the afternoon, usually from 1 to 4. It works every day now!!! And it makes his Mommy very happy. Alexei goes to bed around 9. Then he wakes up at 8 and takes his long afternoon nap, which is beautiful!

The next day was Sabbath and we went to church, had lunch and the usual nap. In the evening Alexei’s Grandmommy treated us all to a ride on the carousel at the mall. We all enjoyed riding the horses. There was one more fun surprise for Alexei after this – we went to the children’s play area at the mall. Alexei enjoyed exploring different rides and things there too!

On Sunday we had our big family get together. Thanks to Alexei’s faithful keeping of the schedule, his mommy and daddy got to enjoy it fully. We quietly sat down for a nice meal, played and finished our usual family Christmas game – White Elephant. Of course, when Alexei woke up everybody was happy to see him and he had a couple of new presents to open.

New Years Eve Alexei’s nap schedule changed a little, luckily for me! I got to cook from 3 to 6:30pm and Alexei was rested enough to stay up and meet the new year. We also played a couple of games and watched two movies that night.

New Years Day was fun. We went for a long walk, played different card games with our friends, learned a new card game - “Slaps” taught to us by card-wiz Yuri, and at the end of the day we went iceskating. It was “very nice!”